Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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19.6.14

Gov. Bobby
Jindal has staked perhaps his whole political future on a battle where he
doesn’t exactly have a lot of cards to play to win the hand. But maybe his
political calculus tells him that emerging victorious in the battle isn’t
essential to winning the war.

Yesterday, Jindal announced
several actions through executive orders BJ 2014-6 and BJ 2014-7 designed to
interfere with the Louisiana’s ability to administer exams designed through the
Partnership for Assessment of Readiness
for College and Careers, based upon the Common Core State Standards
initiative. Despite having once been a supporter and with the state’s own
testing used as a model for constructing the PARCC exam, he has become a critic
of the effort, arguing that, even if CCSS does not impose any content standards
in curriculum, PARCC somehow could be used as a tool to impose a nationalized
curriculum, which he opposes. Thus, in stopping PARCC, CCSS falls on its own
accord, the thinking goes.

These are interesting as much for
what they include as what they leave out. First, they order the Department of
Education – directed by the separate Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education and its hired superintendent that runs DOE – essentially to rebid the
contract for testing. The argument used is that DOE allegedly failed to follow
state law in allowing a group procurement for the PARCC organization, because it
could skirt competitive bidding laws -- despite the fact that the contract started with the same firm for using previous tests in 2003 and was renewed regularly since.

HB 96 by state Rep. John Bel Edwards would repeal
the age restriction on service currently for state and local judges. Now, they
cannot run for office if they would be sworn into it after their 70th
birthday. This joins on the ballot a pair of other clunkers, one that locks the
state into spending more on nursing homes even as their need becomes reduced,
creates pressure for tax increases, and/or increases the threat of legal action
against the state, and another that has the
effect of increasing bureaucracy and the size of government with the
establishment of an unneeded cabinet department.

Opposition mainly is driven by
existing judges themselves, as they enjoy the job’s flexibility,
stability, high rate of pay for work required, but perhaps most importantly
because of the power they can wield politically, especially in rural areas,
which allows them to parlay the infrequent elections to them into almost never
losing reelection. Thus, they resent forcible retirement from these plum
positions, and legislators are more than happy to assist them because among the
roughly third of the Legislature that are lawyers, many eye post-legislative
careers either as judges or elected to offices that work with them regularly.

17.6.14

Shreveport television station
KTBS may have just scratched the surface when it ran a story
about unannounced announced city mayoral candidate state Rep. Roy Burrell’s
involvement with a nonprofit organization the activities and accounting for
which raise substantial questions about his potential service as the city’s
chief executive officer.

Burrell, since his days as a city
councilman, has lead an organization known as the Inner City Entrepreneur
Institute, for which he appears not just to make a decent living off its only
activity, a two-week yearly event currently in progress called
BizCamp, but also in
a way that seems, relative to other organizations and their leadership pay, unusual. KTBS
reports since 2005 the city of Shreveport has given ICE a total of
$315,000, and since 2006, the Caddo Parish Commission has given it a total of
$112,000.

But trawling through the group’s
required, as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, Internal
Revenue Service Form 990 for each year since 2001 (excepting 2002, for
which a filing could not be found) reveals a murky picture sometimes obscurant
in details. For these years, the organization garnered $995,702 (and including
2002 figure reported in 2003, over $1 million) – from 2005 on over half of
which came from government grants varying from $66,191 in 2007 to $15,000 in
2009 (forms previous to 2005 are unclear as to whether government grants
comprised revenues). With public support (that is, contributions from outside
government) making up the rest, this has led to wide ranging total figures, of
a high in 2008 of $135,818 to a low of $36,890 in 2002, and thus also in terms
of expenditures – the vast majority of which are for the director Burrell and
the annual event – the most in 2008 of $169,226 to the least in 2009 of
$65,134.

16.6.14

Hope springs eternal and generals
always are fighting the last war. This explains why a number of Louisiana-based
observers continue to miss the obvious: that Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu is in deep trouble in her
reelection bid, as confirmed by a recent
poll.

This one commissioned by an
interest group through a firm that usually conducts polls for Republicans showed
GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy leading Landrieu
50-44, significantly putting him at pulling a simple majority of the vote, It
continues a trend for months now where the combined vote of all announced
Republicans (the two also-rans from the GOP picked up 5 percent of the
remainder, which means the pollsters prompted initially undecided respondents
to make a choice) exceeds the vote for Landrieu.

But the state’s mainstream media hardly
touched the significant breakthrough for Cassidy. It was mentioned
briefly by New Orleans Times-Picayune
reporter Bruce Alpert, who then immediately dismissed it as “it should be taken
with a grain of salt” because it “seems to over-represent Republican voters and
under-represent African Americans.”

The latter bill introduces more
stringent and constitutional restrictions on the operation of abortion clinics,
with an eye on making it safer for its surviving human, the adult female
patient. Currently, three of the state’s five operating mills without modifying
their buildings or practices would not meet the new requirements. Critics, legally
unsuccessfully in other states with similar laws, have complained that these
amount to limiting abortions so severely as to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court
declaration that abortion can’t be made always illegal. Proponents contend that
these reduce the risk of adult deaths added to those of the unborn, to which critics
respond by saying women dying as a result of complications from legal abortion is
rare.

Maybe rare, but it does
happen even when done according to the law. And if erring on the side of
life when considering unborn humans is not respected adequately in American
jurisprudence, there’s no excuse not to do so when it comes to a female already
born voluntarily choosing an elective if unsavory procedure. Abortion cannot be
justified by putting even more innocent lives at needless, avoidable risk.

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